Garments are optimally displayed and maintained on hangers sized appropriately to the garment. A garment manufacturer or retailer can achieve this either by using differently sized fixed width hangers or by using adjustable width hangers. Similarly, an end user could adopt a particularly sized fixed width hanger or selectively adjust an adjustable width hanger to his garment size.
The prior art is replete with various configurations of garment hangers which incorporate structure for selectively adjusting the hanger's width to accommodate different size garments. Applicant's pending EPO Patent application 95301062.6, U.S. application Ser. No. 08/201,539, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,085,358 and 5,102,019 disclose some such structures as do certain ones of the references U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,024,954, 5,044,535, 2,477,873, European patents DE-C-286 192, WO-A-94 02056, DE-U-88 04 572 and DE-A-40 07 320 cited therein.